1st to Fight (Earth at War) Read online

  “Jesus, Andy, you sure about this?” Jambo hadn’t bothered to change his comms to private, but I suppose all the Delta boys knew enough about me and my background to figure why he’d asked the question. “I mean, this is our first dust-up with these guys. We don’t know what they’re capable of.”

  “Just follow me in on a tight wedge,” I told him. “I’m going to make a beeline straight across the compartment and draw their attention towards me. And try not to hit anything important, after all the shit you gave the Rangers.”

  “All right,” Jambo acceded. “But you’re not going alone. Quinn!”

  “Yes, Master Sergeant?” the Ranger corporal asked, stepping out of the loose perimeter his squad had formed to our rear.

  “You and Major Clanton are taking point. Follow his lead and do what he says and otherwise, just keep him from getting killed.”

  “Roger that.” Quinn’s visor scanned back and forth for a second before he found me. We all looked alike suited up.

  “Stack up, boys,” Jambo ordered. “Sgt. Masterson, the rest of your people are in behind ours and don’t shoot anything in front of our firing arc. I’m not looking for Blue-on-Blue fire here.”

  “I’m against it as well, if my opinion means anything,” I added, staring down the maw of the gravity ramp and letting my mouth run the way it always does when I’m nervous. “Blue has always been my favorite color.”

  “Andy.” This time, Jambo was on the private net and his voice wasn’t his no-nonsense Combat-Mode Jambo, it was more the guy who I’d come to know as a friend these last few months. “You don’t have to do this.”

  “You know I do, bud,” I said, though whether I was trying to convince him or myself, I wasn’t sure. “You guys ready?”

  “We’re set,” Jambo declared. He was, I thought, the recruiting poster for the Space Force, his rifle held at low ready, his armor half in shadow from the gravity ramp, half in the light of the corridor.

  “This would make a hell of a book,” I said, “if I ever get the chance to write it.”

  “It’s not your genre, Andy,” Jambo said, and I could hear his grin even if I couldn’t see it. “It’s not science fiction anymore, it’s current events.”

  The team formed into a tight wedge and I, Andrew Jackson Clanton Jr., preacher’s kid, Marine, failed husband, failed father, recovering alcoholic, hack science fiction writer, and possibly the luckiest man on the face of the Earth, was going to lead a hardass group of Delta Force operators and Space Rangers into the engine room of an alien starship.

  “Ooh-rah,” I murmured, then started running.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  I wasn’t worried about mines or booby-traps. The Tevynians wouldn’t booby-trap their only way in or out of Engineering, and they probably didn’t even know we were here if they’d shut down the security scanners. If they expected anything, it would be more Helta, poorly organized, lightly equipped, bad at fighting. Or at least that thought was what kept me running.

  The deck sloped down at a ninety-degree angle, but the second I stepped on it, it was straight up and down and the deck behind me was the one cockeyed from reality and God, I hate that shit! Why can’t they just use elevators?

  My footsteps echoed in chorus with Quinn’s in the hollow emptiness of the gravity ramp, but he hung off my left shoulder, just out of my peripheral vision, and all I saw was darkness. My helmet’s vision enhancements penetrated the gloom and still showed me nothing, the bulkheads blocking any thermal readings from inside the compartment ahead, the corridor itself featureless and empty. I could understand not having a sentry actually in the hallway—hell, I wouldn’t want to be standing on the edge of the gravity shift, either. But there was definitely going to be at least two or three of them after I hit the next right-angle shift, and even if they didn’t expect me, they’d burn me down the second I came out of the junction, and I could only shoot at one of them at a time…with the rifle, anyway.

  The grenade launchers mounted on either side of the suit’s backpack power unit were built for open spaces, needing a three-meter vertical clearance to launch safely, but they also had this handy little programmable detonation feature. I’d read about them when I was researching the United the Stars series and shamelessly stole the idea, and I’d assumed Jambo would already know about them, but he had never heard of them. It had taken ten emails and a half a dozen phone calls to get them into production, which wasn’t a bad average for the military procurement system.

  “Grenades,” I told Quinn, hoping my helmet’s laser line-of-sight communications would work where the radios wouldn’t.

  “In here?” His tone was incredulous. He knew the limitations of the weapon as well as I did.

  “Program for independent detonation just the other side of the junction and follow my lead.”

  I toggled the menu for the targeting reticle over to the grenade launchers while I ran, which was worse than trying to walk and chew gum, but we’d practiced it and I was, ironically given the company I kept, better at it than any of the Rangers except Quinn. The warheads were a special blend designed post-Helta and issued specifically for this mission and although I hadn’t had any hand in designing them, they sure as hell sounded like something I would have written into my books. A kilogram of a new chemical formula the Helta had provided, something we were calling HyPex, short for hyper-explosive, ten times more energetic than C4, surrounded by adjustable baffles of the same sort of alloy the Helta used for spaceship hulls, packed in with sintered metallic hydrogen. I told the baffles which way I wanted the blast to hit, which was, in this case, in a 180-degree half-sphere in front of me, and they would arrange themselves in mid-flight. The warhead would burst when and where I told it to, and all that energy would turn the metallic hydrogen into a plasma. And you did not want to be standing where that plasma came through.

  Twenty meters to the junction. This wouldn’t work until we were right on top of it, and even if it did, the disorientation passing through the junction was going to be a problem. Hopefully, Quinn could pull it off if I couldn’t.

  Ten meters. I was nowhere near a full sprint for the suit, just a steady gallop, but the junction was rushing up at me and I had to time this just right.

  Five meters. I couldn’t do the math in my head, so I guessed. This was close enough.

  “Now!”

  I threw myself forward into a head-first dive, sliding through the junction on my belly, gravity shifting ninety degrees suddenly and violently, wrenching at the muscles of my back. I pushed the pain into a compartment and triggered the grenade launchers. The discharge pushed back on my shoulders and I turned the push into a scramble up to my feet.

  I had about a half a second to process what I was seeing. My mind worked back to front in reverse order of importance to my survival, which I found intensely annoying, so the first thing I noticed was the cluster of figures standing at a control station surrounding the base of the largest power trunk. They had some sort of computer equipment in latching cases with them, laid out open on the deck, with cables hooked up to data ports in the slanted surface of the control panels, though I had no clue what any of it was for. They were wearing body armor but they had their helmets off and two of them were women, their hair long and twisted into braids.

  There were four or five of the technicians, but if they had rifles, they weren’t carrying them at the moment, so the worst they could do to me was delete my Facebook account. They’d brought a reinforced infantry squad to guard the techs, which was much more of an immediate problem. Six of them were arrayed in a half-circle perimeter around the central power trunk, though from their stance and the way the emitters of their lasers were pointing down at the deck, I don’t think they expected company.

  The last four were the problem. They’d been assigned to guard the entrance, and they were taking their job seriously, weapons held at the ready, the crystalline emitters somehow much more intimidating than a conventional barrel. Though nowhere near as int
imidating as the four grenades exploding right in their faces.

  It felt strange not to duck. It was one of the first things they taught you on the grenade range in Boot: once you pull the pin, Mr. Grenade is not your friend. But the baffles focused the explosives away from me and the armor protected from fragments and I stood there like a big idiot and watched the grenades blow up.

  It reminded me of the Fourth of July fireworks shows in Tampa when I was a kid, starbursts of pure white at the heart of the blasts, with spears of plasma stabbing outward, the sun rays crossing each other, leaving not a centimeter of space for anything to live. One second the four enemy troops stood ready, unmoving, statues guarding a mountain pass. The next, all four of the proud, broad-shouldered soldiers were the walking dead, still on their feet only by the grace of inertia, sliced to pieces by the plasma warheads.

  Their corpses hadn’t even begun to fall before the rest of the Tevynians opened up on us. We’d had to set the warheads blind, not knowing where the enemy troops would be, and we’d both set the proximity fuses too shallow. The grenades had killed the shit out of the sentries at the door, but the other six were fifty yards away, halfway across the compartment, and the concussion might have knocked them back on their heels, but it sure as hell didn’t kill them.

  The lasers fired in the infrared range, so theoretically, they should have been invisible, and if we’d been in a vacuum, maybe they would have been, but not here. They ripped apart the air, the high-energy bursts ionizing tunnels of atmospheric gases, blasting streams of plasma and filling the whole compartment with static electricity. It probably would have been much more impressive if they’d been aiming, but they fired in a panic at the explosions and came closer to hitting each other than they did Quinn or me.

  I was aiming. If I could have set the M900 for full auto and buzz-sawed back and forth, I could have taken the whole lot of them out in a second, but we kind of needed the ship intact, so I put a single round into the closest of the Tevynians at low velocity. The slug didn’t flash or crackle or create its own lightning, but it punched through the Tevynian armor like it wasn’t there and the enemy soldier pitched forward.

  There were a lot of things I could have done right then, and maybe some of them would have been smarter than what I did. I could have just gone down to the prone—the rest of the team was coming in behind me and I just had to buy a couple of seconds. Or I could have charged straight in and counted on their own confusion to keep them from hitting me. Instead, I headed left and I think I yelled at Quinn to go right. I don’t honestly remember saying it, but he went the opposite direction and I had to assume it was because I told him to.

  Another of the Tevynian soldiers went down, tumbling to the side, I guessed from Quinn’s shots because I was too busy running to get an accurate bead on any of them and I didn’t want to risk hitting the Ranger. Lasers sliced into the bulkheads, sending flashes of molten and sublimated metal flaring in gouts of fire only a meter behind me, and if I could have run faster, I would have, but then I would have overshot the eight foot tall spindle of superconductive cable mounted near the starboard bulkhead, replacement parts for the power trunks. They had them on the Truthseeker and I’d figured without even looking they’d have them here, too.

  I threw the Svalinn into a slide like I was stealing third base back in Little League, digging the fingers of my left hand into the slick, synthetic floor plating to try to stop before I passed out the other side of the spindle. Laser pulses hit the superconductive cable and coruscated down the length of it, sending heat and static electricity pouring into the insulated deck and throwing up billows of smoke and steam as fireproof material tried very hard to burn.

  Finally coming to a halt, I threw myself out onto my left shoulder just far enough past the spindle for my rifle’s barrel to clear it, dropped the reticle onto one of the Tevynian soldiers who was rushing straight for my position and touched the trigger pad. I hadn’t felt the kick of the first shot, too numbed by the adrenaline, but I felt this one, especially from the prone. It wasn’t quite as bad as firing a full-power shot at the Brads back in Idaho, but the M900 let me know it was there. The Tevynian had no doubts, not once the depleted uranium slug ripped through his sternum and took a few inches of breastbone out the back of his spine.

  One of the women at the control console cried out and threw her hands across her face a half-second too late to stop the blood spatter. I had a preternaturally clear view of the blood hitting her across the cheek, her neck, the horror in her eyes so much like the horror I’d seen in the eyes of people on the streets of Caracas. She was human. I mean, I’d known they looked just like us, but I’d thought they might have been changed, mutated by whoever had taken the Helta and fucked with their genes, maybe turned the humans into something more aggressive and evil. I should have known better. Humans didn’t need mutation to be evil.

  I rolled off my shot and a lightning bolt of ionized air crackled into the floor where my head had been only a heartbeat before, and I could feel the heat from the laser cooking the deck plate even through the heavy armor, the feeling of stepping out of a transport bird into the heat of a summer afternoon in Kuwait.

  It had been less than ten seconds and I’d killed six people, but someone was hosing laser fire into my position, charring the bulkheads on either side of the spindle and turning the bundles of superconductive wire into the white-hot coils of a Van Der Graff generator and I was going to have to chance jumping out into the oncoming fire because the only reason to pin me down was to have another of their soldiers flank me and where the hell is Jambo?

  The laser had stopped firing and it took me nearly a full second to notice, for the charge crackling through the cables to dissipate and the smoke and flames pouring off the bulkheads to die away. All I could hear was the rasp of my own breathing inside the helmet, hard enough that the interior of the visor fogged up faster than the internal cooling fan could clear it off.

  “Clear,” Jambo said, his tone flat and clinical. It warmed up to something more human with the next words. “You okay back there, Andy?”

  It took me a couple of seconds to work up the nerve to step out from behind cover. The Tevynians were dead, all of them, men and women, soldiers and technicians. I hadn’t heard the shots from the KE guns over the thunderclaps of the laser rifles, but they’d done their job just as well for the lack of attention. It all looked too antiseptic. Their armor had contained much of the carnage, the insults to human anatomy that the weapons of war inflicted. No intestines spilled out, no stink of voided wastes penetrated the filters of my helmet, just pools of blood spilled in silence.

  The technicians had tried to run, but there’d been nowhere to go. They faced away from the shots that had killed them, all but one tall, statuesque woman who seemed proud even in death, her green eyes fixed and staring her defiance to gods only she could see.

  Why? Why the fuck had I let them pull me back into this? Had I forgotten what it was like?

  I’d heard it said that when parents decided to have a second child, it was after enough time had passed that they’d forgotten the lost sleep and the screaming and the puking and the dirty diapers and only recalled the good parts, the fond memories. I think that must have been true of war, as well. It had been too long and I’d forgotten the sights and sounds and smells of death, the fear and the horror and the waste, and only recalled the camaraderie and the jokes and the glory of surviving the unsurvivable.

  “Andy?” Jambo repeated, and I thought it must have been his Svalinn suit clomping across the compartment toward me. “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah,” I said, my voice dry, my mouth filled with cotton. I took a sip of water from the nipple positioned next to my chin. “Yeah, I’m okay.” I switched to the general net. “Quinn, you good?”

  “Yeah, right here, sir.” A Svalinn suit raised its hand, the words somehow disconnected from the motion. We were robots, faceless automatons, killing machines.

  “Pops, go get th
ose Helta engineers in here,” Jambo said. “Have ’em make sure nothing got too banged up for this ship to fly. We need to get the hell out of here.”

  “I’ll do it,” I volunteered.

  I left them there and strode across the compartment, past the Tevynians I’d killed with the grenades, trying not to look at the bodies on my way out of the hatchway. The gravity ramp wrenched at my stomach and this time I had to clamp my jaws shut to keep from puking. The Rangers waited at the juncture, alert and spastic, ready to fire at any shadow, while the Helta huddled against the bulkhead, looking very much like they would have rather been anywhere else in the universe.

  “It’s clear down there,” I reported. “Take the engineers in to check out the equipment.

  I settled back onto my heels and popped up my visor, taking a breath of the ship’s air. It was recycled and had the antiseptic scent of the unnatural, but it was better than the smell of my own sweat. The engineers alerted at the sight of my face like squirrels spotting a circling hawk and it took Brannas-Fel a long moment to reassure them before they were willing to accompany the Rangers down into the compartment.

  Brannas-Fel hung back, hesitating beside me as the others headed into the gravity ramp.

  “Is it true?” he asked, and this time the clicks and gutturals of his own language were loud and clear before my headphones translated it for me. “Are you really here to help us?”

  “We’re not Tevynians,” I told him. “We’re from Earth, what you call the Source. Joon-Pah came to us asking for help fighting this war and we came here to get a ship so we could protect our world from your enemies.” I sighed. “Well, we’d hoped we would get three ships, but we didn’t expect the system to be under attack.”

  “There are hyperdrives,” he told me. “In the next construction spar over from this ship, I saw three hyperdrive units latched to one of the dock tenders. They were intended to be installed in ships under construction here at the shipyards but they hadn’t been delivered yet. If you can get to the tender, you could bring it into our hangar bay.”